WHEN YOU REVIEW MOVIES you occasionally have to go to more than one screening a day. This isn’t any sort of hardship, but it can result in bizarre pairings. The weirdest movie day I’ve had was in the summer of ’98 when I saw “Saving Private Ryan” at 10:00 a.m., followed, a few short hours later, by “There’s Something About Mary.” A few days ago I caught a screening of the earnestly pretentious adaptation of Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain.” Lots of Anthony Hopkins’s winter passion and Nicole Kidman’s flat little stomach. Kidman plays a 34-year-old, hard-on-her-luck janitor, who has an exquisitely developed and maintained body. Janitors don’t have bodies like that–most models don’t have bodies like that. Why is it that actors routinely put on weight or let themselves go to seed if the role requires it, but actresses almost never do? Is this a matter of vanity or studio economics? I suspect it’s both.

The second half of my double feature was “Scary Movie 3.” Whatever else might be wrong with this slight film, you can say this much: It has no pretensions whatsoever.